“And now if you will get my hat and coat, I will be off and let you go to work,” concluded the Captain, with an air of continued urgency.

Peter became thoroughly amused at such an outcome of the old gentleman’s headlong attack on his work,—­a stroll down to the village to hold conversation with friends.  The mulatto walked unsmilingly to a little closet where the Captain hung his things.  He took down the old gentleman’s tall hat, a gray greatcoat worn shiny about the shoulders and tail, and a finely carved walnut cane.  Some reminiscence of the manners of butlers which Peter had seen in theaters caused him to swing the overcoat across his left arm and polish the thin nap of the old hat with his right sleeve.  He presented it to his employer with a certain duplication of a butler’s obsequiousness.  He offered the overcoat to the old gentleman’s arms with the same air.  Then he held up the collar of the greatcoat with one hand and with the other reached under its skirts, and drew down the Captain’s long day coat with little jerks, as if he were going through a ritual.

Peter grew more and more hilarious over his barber’s manners.  It was his contribution to the old gentleman’s literary labors, and he was doing it beautifully, so he thought.  He was just making some minute adjustments of the collar when, to his amazement, Captain Renfrew turned on him.

“Damn it, sir!” he flared out.  “What do you think you are?  I didn’t engage you for a kowtowing valet in waiting, sir!  I asked you, sir, to come under my roof as an intellectual co-worker, as one gentleman asks another, and here you are making these niggery motions!  They are disgusting!  They are defiling!  They are beneath the dignity of one gentleman to another, sir!  What makes it more degrading, I perceive by your mannerism that you assume a specious servility, sir, as if you would flatter me by it!”

The old lawyer’s face was white.  His angry old eyes jerked Peter out of his slight mummery.  The negro felt oddly like a grammar-school boy caught making faces behind his master’s back.  It shocked him into sincerer manners.

“Captain,” he said with a certain stiffness, “I apologize for my mistake; but may I ask how you desire me to act?”

“Simply, naturally, sir,” thundered the Captain, “as one alumnus of Harvard to another!  It is quite proper for a young man, sir, to assist an old gentleman with his hat and coat, but without fripperies and genuflections and absurdities!”

The old man’s hauteur touched some spring of resentment in Peter.  He shook his head.

“No, Captain; our lack of sympathy goes deeper than manners.  My position here is anomalous.  For instance, I can talk to you sitting, I can drink with you standing, but I can’t breakfast with you at all.  I do that in camera, like a disgraceful divorce proceeding.  It’s precisely as I was treated coming down here South again; it’s as I’ve been treated ever since I’ve been